When bad things happen to good sculptures, they can end up like those abandoned rowboats that wash up on northern Minnesota lawns -- filled with petunias and surrounded by white-painted rocks. Until recently that was pretty much the fate of "Protagoras," an often controversial 4-ton sculpture of folded steel that sat for 30 years in front of the federal courthouse in downtown St. Paul. Wayward styrofoam cups and litter blew into its crevices, and a well-meaning but misguided gardener tried to domesticate the thing by ringing it with colorful annuals and creeping vines that shimmied...
photo: WN/LM1
